Xia Gui, Wade-Giles romanization Hsia Kuei (flourished 1195–1224, Qiantang [now Hangzhou], Zhejiang province, China), one of China’s greatest masters of landscape painting, cofounder with Ma Yuan of the Ma-Xia school. The album leaf and the hand scroll with a continuous panorama were his predominant forms. His works are typically in ink monochrome, occasionally with a few touches of colour. His style is characterized by short, sharp, angular strokes suggesting rapid execution.

Life

Xia’s birth and death dates are unknown. According to most Chinese sources, however, he served in the Imperial Academy (Yuhuayuan) under the emperor Ning Zong (reigned 1194/95–1224/25), eventually attaining the rank of daizhao, or “painter in attendance,” and being awarded the highest honour a court painter could receive, the Golden Belt. The earliest source of information on him, however, a collection of painters’ biographies compiled in 1298 by Zhuang Su and titled Huaji Buyi, states that he was active in the academy under the reign of the emperor Lizong (reigned 1224/25–1264/65). Perhaps his service in the academy overlapped these two reigns and can provisionally be dated about 1200 to 1240.

He was born in or near the city of Hangzhou in Zhejiang province, then the capital of China, to which the imperial court had been moved in the early 12th century when the north of China was invaded by the Jin (Nüzhen) Tatars. Because of this move, the latter half of the Song dynasty is known as the Southern Song period (1127–1279). During this period, the centre of painting and the concentration of major artists was in the Imperial Painting Academy. Accordingly, the leading masters of the 12th and the first half of the 13th centuries, with a few exceptions, were the court painters of Hangzhou. Most famous among them are Xia and his contemporary Ma, whose school of painting came to be known as the Ma-Xia school.

No information exists on Xia’s early artistic training or the identity of his teacher, but most sources agree that he followed the stylistic tradition of an earlier landscapist in the academy, Li Tang. Li’s career extended from the late 11th century until sometime after 1138, when the court resettled in Hangzhou. He transformed the monumental, imposing landscape type of the 11th century into a new, more intimate image of nature. Where early Song landscape paintings had been carefully constructed microcosms, complex in design and full of detail, with small figures, buildings, and so forth, scattered throughout the scene, Li simplified his compositions and limited his materials, achieving a more sharply focused and immediate effect. He thus, with his followers, created the new mode of landscape sometimes called the lyric style. His ideas were developed and exploited by academy landscapists later in the 12th century, practically all of whom were to some degree his followers.

Xia was no exception. The painting that is stylistically earliest among his signed, reliable works—a fan-shaped album leaf in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan, representing two men in a house in a valley gazing out at a waterfall—follows fairly closely the models of earlier 12th-century academy masters who imitated Li, but it brings the scene even closer than they had, further limiting the range of view and focusing interest on the two figures. The drawing is more conventional than in Xia’s later works.

The favourite form of the Southern Song academy painters was the album leaf, which sometimes took the round or oblate shape that indicates it was originally mounted on a flat fan but more often was square, or nearly square. Most of Xia’s surviving works are album leaves. Two preserved in Japan—a signed landscape in the famous collective album called Hikkōen (“Garden Plowed by the Brush”) and another, unsigned, in the Tokyo National Museum—along with a signed, fan-shaped leaf in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts representing a sailing boat on a river during a storm, with houses and windswept trees on the shore—are widely accepted as genuine productions of his hand. All are painted on silk, the two in Japan in ink monochrome, the Boston leaf with a few touches of light colour. All follow the same simple but effective scheme: the composition is diagonally divided, upper left to lower right, with the landmass in the lower segment and the upper segment occupied only by distant hills (in the Hikkōen picture, even these are missing). In each, a central group of leafy trees projects into the empty area, and a house is seen below, partly hidden. In both leaves in Japan, a figure of a farmer returning homeward enters across a bridge in one lower corner; in the Boston leaf, a sailing boat at left serves the same function as a secondary focal point. All are exquisitely calculated, perfectly balanced, conveying with great precision a scene glimpsed through haze, sharply focused at a few points but obscured at others. In all, the void plays as positive a role as the solid masses.

Xia was also a master at composing the hand scroll, or horizontal scroll, which one views by unrolling from one end to the other, rerolling the portion already viewed as one moves. The effect was that of gazing at a continuous panorama, as in an imaginary journey through the scenery of nature. The finest example of that form is his great Pure and Remote View of Streams and Mountains in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Originally signed, it is now missing a final section that bore the signature. A colophon by a later writer, dated 1378, ascribes it to Xia. The remaining portion is about 27 feet (8.2 metres) long. Executed on paper, in rich ink tones ranging from the deepest blacks to subtle, seemingly evanescent, washes of pale gray, it is probably the most brilliant performance in the ink-monochrome technique in the whole of Chinese painting. Strong tonal contrasts are used to give powerful bulk to the rocks by distinguishing their sunlit and shadowed faces. Broad, broken strokes of ink render their rough-textured surfaces. This technique is derived from Li’s “small ax-cut” texture strokes, so called because they suggest a surface hewn with an ax; the broader form, seen in works by Ma and Xia, are called large ax-cut strokes.

These and other features of the drawing agree closely with descriptions of Xia’s style by Chinese writers. They speak of his use of a “split brush” (i.e., the brush tip divided so as to make two or more strokes at once) in painting tree foliage and of his freehand drawing of architecture, bridges, and so forth, “without employing a ruler.” They say that he liked to use a brush with a worn tip, the purpose of this presumably being to avoid the over-refined, “slick” drawing of other Southern Song academy artists. They speak also of his working with great facility and spontaneity, so that the painting was “finished suddenly, in a strange and mysterious way.”

The composition of the Pure and Remote View offers dramatic juxtapositions of near and far, solid and void. Distant parts of the picture are painted in dimmer ink, a basic device for achieving a sense of space in Chinese landscape that is known as atmospheric perspective. The whole impression is of a spacious, mist-hung, peaceful terrain, seen toward twilight. The standard characterization of a Ma-Xia landscape as “romantic” seems well justified in this, the supreme surviving work of the school.

Several other of Xia’s hand-scroll compositions survive in original or copy. The Twelve Views from a Thatched Hut exists in several versions, of which the best by far, preserving, however, only four of the views, is in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. Another fine composition is preserved in a copy in the Shanghai Museum, which originally bore an inscription and the date 1204. A famous and often-recorded work of Xia, his Ten Thousand Miles of the Yangzi River, now survives only in a copy that is probably of the 16th century, in the National Palace Museum.

Hanging-scroll compositions based on Xia’s paintings are less common. The Landscape: A Fisherman’s Abode After the Rain in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is ascribed to him and is in his style. The painting A Misty Gorge in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is in his style and of his period. It reportedly once bore his signature, which was lost in remounting. Several paintings in Japanese collections may be copies of his works; the most famous and often reproduced is the Rain Storm formerly in the Kawasaki Collection, once regarded as a major work of the master but now recognized to be a copy.

For a time after his death, Xia may have suffered the same low esteem as other Southern Song academy painters in the eyes of proponents of the new literati, or scholar-amateur, school of painting, for whom professionalism was equated with empty technique and academicism. Zhuang Su wrote in 1298 in Huaji Buyi:

He painted landscapes and figures, all very vulgar and debased. In the late Song period, when…the world had fallen into decline, and people’s minds were restless and upset, Xia Gui won a name for himself by pursuing excess. But of real substance there is none.

Xia Wenyan, in Tuhui Baojian (1365), wrote of him in more positive terms:

His works have an exciting [stimulating] quality. His ink tones give the effect of colours; his brushwork is mature and controlled; the ink washes are applied rich and wet, a remarkable achievement. His snow scenes are completely based on those of [the 11th-century landscapist] Fan Kuan. Of all the Academy masters of landscape after Li Tang, none was his equal.

Dong Qichang (1555–1636), great artist-critic of the late Ming period, who was generally scornful of the entire professional-academy tradition, exempted Xia somewhat from his sweeping condemnation:

Xia Gui followed Li Tang but added the element of simplicity to his style. What he did was like what clay-workers call “reduced modeling.” In his conceptions and intent, he is quite devoid of the “shortcuts” of imitativeness. With some forms hidden, some sunk [into mist], he has the “ink-plays” of the two Mi’s at his brush-tip.

The last sentence, obscure as it may sound, is especially significant. “Ink-plays” was a term used by scholar-amateur artists for their unassuming, noncommercial pictures. Two who were particularly fond of so designating their paintings were Mi Fei, also known as Mi Fu (1051–1107), and his son Mi Youren (1086–1165), both highly respected by Dong and other literati critics for their spontaneity and inspired, intuitive mode of painting. To relate Xia to them was to credit him with the same qualities, in which academy artists were generally held to be deficient. While it is difficult to see much clear resemblance between paintings by or after the two Mi’s and those of Xia, Dong’s observation is not an empty one: in his use of subtle ink washes to render atmosphere, in his hiding of transitions in mist and reduction of fine-drawn detail, Xia does appear to have learned something from Mi Youren. Such affinities set him apart from his coworkers in the academy, including Ma, whose sleeker and more elegant style, used for carefully constructed, often mannered compositions, seems quite incompatible with the literati painters’ ideals.

Ma’s style proved relatively easy to imitate, and hundreds of later painters did so. The style of Xia, on the other hand, produced its brilliant effects only in the hands of a master; direct attempts at imitation by lesser painters of later times are on the whole pallid and uninteresting. Nevertheless, his influence was considerable. One painter in the Yuan period (1206–1368), Sun Junze, did creditable pictures in a mixed Ma-Xia manner, and some artists of the Zhe school under the Ming dynasty, in the 15th and 16th centuries, executed entertaining variations on the style, while robbing it of most of its depth, both pictorial and expressive. Through these Ming epigones and their flatter, more decorative landscapes, the Ma-Xia school was transplanted in Japan, where it served as the basis for most of the ink-monochrome landscapes of the Muromachi period (1338–1573). Two of the major works of the Japanese painter Sesshū (1420–1506), both hand scrolls, appear to be modeled on paintings by Xia. As late as the early 17th century in China, a few painters were still producing landscapes avowedly “in the manner of Xia Gui.” But the direction that painting took in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911/12) did not allow such tonal subtleties or such concern with space and distance, and Xia’s style was scarcely reflected in paintings of that period, nor was the artist himself mentioned in its literature. It is only in modern times that he has come to be recognized as one of the leading masters of Chinese landscape painting and one of the great interpreters of nature in world art.